Illustrated manuscript fonts11/10/2023 ![]() It was a feature that, as Sawyer himself admits, initially confused players during the testing stage, when a character would suddenly shift from one front to another.įor instance, when the player encounters Baron Lorenz early in the game, he speaks in cursive script as Andreas perceives him as a wealthy man who presumably knows how to read and write. A character's font will change as the player learns more information about them, reflecting Andreas’ changing opinion of that person. ![]() That use of font choices to communicate information about a character goes beyond simple class distinctions. Something that is less refined, but still readable - so there’s a clear distinction where the player goes ‘oh, this is a person who barely knows their letters.’” These people are barely literate, so let’s see if we can derive a peasant hand from the cursive script. It didn’t really look appropriate, we needed a different font for the peasants. “But when the cursive script was being used by the peasantry, it felt too fancy and refined. “As we went out into the village, I thought we should have a more natural cursive script,” says Sawyer. In its earliest prototypes, the game’s world was largely confined to the Abbey, populated by the monks and nuns, for whom the gothic textura font seemed like a natural fit. That number was forced to expand alongside the game’s cast of characters. The earliest days of the game’s development were informed by his desire to have fonts that recreated the physical act of writing, though he hadn’t quite planned on the sheer number of custom fonts in the game. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering.” ![]() “They’re all custom fonts, many of which were created by handwriting them out, using pens that were physically like the pens that would have been used at the time.” “It’s not an exaggeration to say that no feature set took as much time from all departments as the text rendering,” Sawyer notes. ![]() From the start Sawyer knew he wanted Pentiment’s fonts to be as historically accurate as possible, and while other games certainly pay attention to their font choices, few dedicate as many resources to them as Obsidian did with Pentiment. The development team, in partnership with typeface experts Lettermatic, created six different fonts, which they allocated to characters depending on their social status and level of education. In the absence of voice acting, Pentiment instead relies on its fonts to help the player to get an understanding of both who its cast of characters are, and how they feel about the world around them. Almost everyone, it turns out, has a secret. His work as an artist is quickly waylaid when Maler finds himself tasked with finding the killer behind a shocking murder that rocks the town, and, like any good would-be detective, the player finds themselves interviewing the locals to get to the bottom of the mystery. Pentiment puts you in the shoes of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in an abbey in Tassing, Bavaria. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer told me all about how the team revived long-dead historical fonts, to give them a new life in a modern format. What may surprise you, however, is how deep these historical details run throughout Pentinment’s DNA, right down the game’s text fonts. It’s probably not a huge surprise to say that Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s visually intriguing mystery set in 16th century Bavaria, required a lot of historical research during development.
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